Designing Your Email Template: 5 Keys to Keep in Mind

Designing Your Email Template

5 Keys to Keep in Mind

In This Article…

If you’re considering implementing an email marketing program but don’t know where to start with your html email template design, or if you’re currently emailing but feel you’re not getting the results you want, Comm100 explains in this article five key points for optimizing the design of your html email template.

Email Template Design: Not as Simple as it Sounds

There’s a lot of misinformation out in the world about the best way to design an email template. If you’re using a third-party email service that provides templates, that’s a great starting point. However, for reasons of both branding and for those of you not sending your html email through a third-party provider, designing an html email template can come with some unique challenges. While Comm100 can’t guide you step by step through every inch of your template, Comm100 can give you a list of five key things to make sure are happening in your html email template.

1. Design for a Horizontal Preview Pane

The reality is that most people are going to view your email in a horizontal preview pane, either in Outlook, Hotmail or Yahoo! According to a study by MicroMass Communications, the average size of that horizontal preview pane will be 638×86 pixels.

Yes, you read that correctly. Most people won’t even see the first 100 pixels of your email.

What this means is that your template should not be more than 638 pixels wide (Comm100 usually recommends that you stick to 600 pixels) and that you need to make sure that you’ve got value propositions and calls to action within the first 100 pixels. This means that you may want to revisit that nice header graphic. It also means that, if you’re using that header graphic, you’d better make sure it has effective Alt and Title text layered behind it.

You may actually want to take a screen shot of your Outlook inbox and layer your email in on top of it in Photoshop to see how it presents! But any way you break it down, you need to assume that you have 600×100 pixels or less to convince a user to keep reading your email.

2. Maximize with Two Columns

It’s unlikely that, in the average of 54 seconds somebody is taking to look at your email, they will scroll very far down. One way to maximize the amount of information (and links) that they see is to use a two column format. Comm100 recommends a 200 pixel side column and a 400 pixel main column. The side column will allow you to provide smaller segments of information and navigational links. The larger column will be where the main content of your email lives.

There’s some debate about where the side column should live in terms of the right or left side of the email template. Comm100 thinks that the left side is a better optimization, because no matter how narrow the preview pane your user is using (unless they are viewing in a very small, vertical preview pane, which is unlikely), with a left side 200 pixel column and the larger 400 pixel column on the right side, they will be exposed to the content in both columns.

However, if your table building and html is not extremely clean, the left hand column can create viewing problems and push the right hand column out of the screen. Placing the smaller column on the right ensures that your main column and content will always be seen.

Try both, and test them into various email clients to see!

3. Define Images and Links!
Another thing that you’ll need to remember is that email clients are far less forgiving than a web browser with html. Therefore, you need to be extra careful with how your developer or coder makes your html email template.

The size of every image needs to be defined. This means that in the html code, the image reference needs to say what the width and height of the image is. Otherwise, you could see your layout break. And as we discussed in the article about images, make sure you’re using Alt and Title tags.

Also, links need to be “absolute” rather than “relative”. Chances are that on your website, you use relative links. This means that you don’t always have the full url of the link in the html code. But in an html email template, you’ll need to use the full url.

4. We Know It Sounds like a Broken Record, But Limit Your Use of Images

This one is so important that Comm100 wrote an entire article about it! So Comm100 won’t go into it in great detail here, but it is one of the most important things that you need to remember when designing an email template. Keep the use of images to a minimum and use html and formatted text to convey your message.

Images look great, it’s true, but they can cause many problems with your email marketing campaign’s performance.

5. Keep Things Short and Simple

It doesn’t matter how great your content is, people are not going to read your email! They’re going to scan it, and they’re going to scan it in under a minute. Instead of providing them with large chunks of content, design your email template to include large headlines and then shorter sections of content that link to your website or destination page.

Using bulleted lists can also help you with this. The key is to not overwhelm people with too much text or to create an email template where people are required to read in large chunks in order to get the point that you’re conveying.

There’s value in your content, it’s true. But an email is not a web page, and how people behave in their inbox is different than how they behave, say, on a blog. Keep your content short, sweet, to the point and use it to drive clicks rather than provide information.

Bonus! HTML Tips!

Also remember that email clients are picky about how they read html. Here are some tips for coding your html email template in a way that will resolve well in most email clients.

•Use HTML tables to control the design layout. Do NOT use pure CSS layouts: that just hold up in an email environment
•Use inline CSS to control other presentation elements
•CSS style declarations must appear below the body tag
•Do NOT use CSS shorthand: instead of using the abbreviated style rule font: 12px/16px Arial, Helvetica, break this shorthand into its individual properties: font-family, font-size, and line-height.
•Use spans and divs VERY sparingly to achieve specific effects, use HTML tables do the bulk of the layout work.
Designing an html email template can be a challenge, but the good news is that once you have one that you like and that delivers consistently to the inbox, you can reuse it over and over again. Take the time to design an appropriate template the first time, and you’ll experience the benefits with all future sends!

The first step to getting started with email marketing, whether you’re designing an email template for the first time or working to optimize an existing one, is to select a quality email sending partner. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground to just about any type of customer or client email list! Check it out at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Open Rate Woes: Why Not to be Fooled by Low Open Rate Numbers

Open Rate Woes
Why not to be Fooled by Low Open Rate Numbers

In This Article…

If you’ve implemented an email marketing program but aren’t satisfied with or are confused by low open rate numbers, Comm100 explains in this article why traditional open rate metrics don’t tell the true number of people who opened your email. Comm100 then explores how to use open rate numbers to improve your campaign’s performance even if the open rate itself isn’t completely accurate.

What is Open Rate and Why is It Important?

Open rate is the number of people (in percentage form) who opened and looked at an email. It is considered to be one of the most important performance metrics of email marketing because it ultimately tells you how much your audience cared about your email and how many people looked at it. You’ll see many statistics about what your open rate should be. Often, what you’ll be told is that, for an opt-in house list, your open rate should be approximately 20%. And that’s great, if your open rate is being tracked reliably. Unfortunately, it’s less and less possible to track open rates correctly, and, increasingly, the metric needs to be used in a relative term. Let’s first discuss why open rate metrics aren’t reliable any more and then discuss how you can make open rate useful to you as a metric.

The Imperfect Nature of the Open Rate

To understand why an open rate is an unreliable way to track email performance, you need to understand how an open rate is tracked. A small one pixel by one pixel graphic is inserted into the email that you send. Then, each time the pixel is loaded, the email registers as having been opened. In some advanced cases, the pixel is tied to the recipient and is only counted once. But the point is that the graphic needs to load in order for the email to get counted as having been opened. There are three problems with this tracking method.

The first problem is that for the open to register, your user must have the graphics loaded in the email. As Comm100 has previously discussed, many email providers and users never load the graphics in an email. Without the graphics loaded, it’s entirely possible that your email has been read but that the open or reading of the email has never been registered.

The second problem is users who choose to receive their email in a text only format. These users will read your email, but because the version of the email that they are reading doesn’t include any html, it also doesn’t include any images. Again, the opening of the email is never recorded.

Finally, and increasingly, the number of users who read their email on a mobile phone will only see the text version of your email. And, of course, seeing only the text version means not having an image, thus not having a pixel graphic, and thus not having an open recorded even if they do read.

It’s a generally accepted metric in the email marketing world that open rate reporting can be off from anywhere from 11% to 35%. That’s a lot! So while it may look like nobody is opening your email, it could actually be true that your email is doing quite well.

Three Ways to Make Open Rate a Relevant Metric for You

Once you accept that your open rate really isn’t your open rate, there are some ways to make the metric useful to you regardless.

Extrapolate the Real Success by Comparing to Better Metrics: Open rate is not a variable metric these days. However, click-through rates and (if your tracking is set up correctly) conversions to sales or sign-ups are hard numbers, which means that you do know how successful your email was by looking at them. You can work backwards from those metrics. Find your most successful emails in terms of click-through and conversions and then see what the open rate was on those emails. You’ll be able to then target what a good “relative” open rate for your email program is. It’s not a perfect number because factors like offer and creative assist with the click-through once an email is opened, but it can give you an idea of what to aim for.

Make the Open Rate Relative to Other Email Sends: You may not know what your true open rate is, but you know what the relative open rate between emails that you’ve sent is. If you sent an email on the first Friday of the month that got a 25% open rate and an email on the second Friday of the month that got a 10% open rate, then something that you did in the first email send was better. It may have been the offer, the subject line, the time of day or even just that people have more money at the beginning of the month. Whatever it was, you know that your open rate for that email was a better performance, and you should repeat what you did there in other opportunities to improve your overall open rate moving forward.

Use A/B Testing: It’s true that not everybody loves setting up a complicated A/B test, but with email it’s fairly easy to just split your list in half and send two different emails to see which one performs better. Comm100 certainly suggests, at a minimum, sending two different subject lines to learn which one will perform better to generate opens. Doing an A/B email test with two factors and then seeing which one fared better in opens can draw value from the open rate metric by showing you which strategy will work better in future emails.

It’s not as though email open rates are an entirely useless statistic or metric. However, they’re not used the same way that they used to be because they don’t log numbers that are reliable any more. Knowing how what you’ve done with your email has impacted its success or failure is the only way to make your email campaigns better. Use open rate metrics in comparison or as relative numbers to improve your campaign, but don’t be discouraged if your email tracking software says that your open rates are very low percentages! It’s likely that they aren’t as bad as it seems.

Whether you’ve mastered the open rate metric or are still trying to figure it out, the first step to a successful email marketing campaign is selecting an email provider who meets your needs. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary tutorial on open rate metrics, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground! Check it out at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Keep ‘em Clicking: Seven Tips to Improve Click-Through Rates

Keep ‘em Clicking
Seven Tips to Improve Click-Through Rates

In This Article…

If you’ve been sending marketing email already but aren’t satisfied with your click-through rate, or if you’re designing your first html email template and want to make sure that it’s optimized for the best possible click-through results, this article covers seven best practices for getting the most click-through response from your email sends.

Why is Click-Through Important?

You’ve mastered getting your email into the inbox, and you’ve found subject lines and an email list that will respond to and open your emails. Congratulations! You’ve made great progress. What’s the next step? It’s to get the people who have opened your email to actually click-through your email to your product. After all, the entire purpose of your email is to drive traffic to your website or landing page.

You’d be surprised how a few small changes can really optimize the click-through rate to your website. Here, Comm100 will break down the lucky seven things that you can do to help ensure that your click-through rate is just about as good as it possibly could be.

1. Make Sure that Your Links Look Like Links

It’s very easy to begin to think that your links should look neat and stylized, especially if you have a tightly controlled brand style on your website. However, your links will get clicked the most if they look like links and people can easily identify them as links. At a minimum, every link in your email should be underlined, like a standard link, so that it is easily identifiable to the user visually as a link. Though it may be outside of the scope of your brand guidelines, consider making the links in your email the standard blue link color. What’s the reason for this? Some emails will strip out your style scripts anyway. Making your links standard blue will make them obvious links to users in any context.

2. Make Sure There is a Link Above the Fold

This is the same rule as applies with landing pages. In the case of an email, however, “Above the Fold” actually means within the first inch and a half of the email. Over half of all people who read (or just scan) your email will do so in a horizontally-oriented email preview pane. That means that you have less than two inches of space to convince them to click something. If you fill up the top inch and a half or two inches of your email with an image and text and no obvious links, you may miss your entire opportunity to get a user to click through to your website or landing page. Even if it means less use of image and a harder selling text style, make sure you get at least one obvious link in the top inch and a half of your email. Otherwise, many users will never even see a link to click!

3. Don’t Trap Links in Images

Comm100 has talked previously about how using images to convey important messages in email means that many of your readers will never see the message that you want to convey. This rule applies to “click-through buttons” as well. It’s true that, in a normal web environment, using a graphic button to tell somebody to “enter” or “click” or “submit: is the most effective way to get a response. This is not true in email. If you use a graphic button, half of your users will only see the button’s alt or title text. Alt and title text is not as compelling as a large font, brightly colored text link. Instead of graphic buttons, use either large font text links or create an html button. A good coder can create an html button that is both visually appealing and always visible in your email (whereas a graphic won’t be!).

4. TELL People to Click

Comm100 has already talked about making sure that your links are not too visually subtle, but this is true for the text you choose to use around your links as well. Again, this isn’t a webpage and you have limited time to get somebody to click. So, rather than using subtle text strings, make sure you are using call to action and order text such as “Click here to…” or “Click this link.” The one thing that you want to be careful of is that you don’t do this too much, because spam filters don’t like emails that have dozens of large, bolded, “click here” links. But you want at least a couple of links that obviously tell your users where and what to click.

5. Use Alt and Title Text Effectively

Just in case you’ve had a brain freeze moment, alt and title text are the text snippets that appear underneath images and that are seen either when the image doesn’t load or when a user holds their mouse over the image. You should use both alt and title text fields since different browsers read them differently. The important part of what Comm100 just said that you need to remember is that alt and title tags appear when images don’t load! So not only should those text fields repeat any messages in those images, but they should also be used to also say “Click here for this offer” or “Click for more information.” Every alt or title text field is an opportunity to encourage a click-through.

6. Use LOTS of Links

There is also just a piece of simple math that goes into optimizing your click-through rate. It goes like this: The more opportunities that you give users to click, the more likely that they are to click. If a user has to read through several paragraphs of text to get to a link, they may not get that far. Or they may not care by the time they get to the link. Every text block that you include in an email should include one link. And every image should be a link. It’s just math! More links means more opportunities for a user to click, which means more click-throughs.

7. Double Check Your Text Version

Remember that you should always be sending a corresponding text version with your html email. And remember that that text version will wipe out all of your html links. Make sure that you go through your text version and manually put in the url that users need to visit. It should sound like this “Visit this url (insert full url) to see this product.” If your url is very long and complicated, you may want to consider setting up a shorter url and then redirecting it to the more complicated url after a user types it in.

Those seven tips will, without fail, improve your click-through rate. Just be sure to check your email in a pre-send spam rater to make sure that you haven’t gone overboard with any of these techniques. It’s true that in some cases your email won’t look as pretty when you’re following these rules, but Comm100 can assure you that, from a click-through perspective, it will perform better!

Even before you get ready to optimize your click-through rate, the first step in generating a successful email campaign is to choose an email provider who meets your needs. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary of click-through optimization tips, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground and then testing ways to improve your click-through rate! Check it out at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Timing is Everything: What is the Best Day of the Week to Send an Email to Your Customers?

In This Article…

If you’ve implemented an email marketing program and want to optimize how many people open and click-through your email, knowing what day of the week and at what time of day to send your email is a key element to improving metrics. Sending on the wrong day can impact your email performance negatively. In this article Comm100 will explain when the best days are to send email and what the best time of day to send is.

Is Timing Really Important?

If only sending a successful email campaign were as simple as putting together a compelling offer, a great creative, an enticing subject line and sending your message. But it’s not! In the quest to get your users to open an email, the day and time that you send an email is also incredibly important. Continue reading to find out when is best for you to send.

The Open Rate Tail: Don’t Send Day-Of Emails

The first thing that you need to know is that, while a large portion of your recipients are going to open your email the day that they receive it, not all of them will. As people visit their inboxes less frequently during the day and instead hit social networks, the number of days it takes between sending an email and a user reading it has grown. It used to be a commonly accepted metric that a marketing email or newsletters had a three day “open tail”. These days, most people allow up to five days for stragglers to open emails.

This is important to you if you send emails that relate to specific events. For example, an email about a prediction on a sports event or last minute tickets to a concert. Sending the email the day of the event means that, by the time a significant portion of your audience reads the email, the event will be over. At a minimum, send your email three days before the target event. If you want to be extra safe, increase that to five days.

What Time Is It?

It’s not between 8:00am and 9:00am EST if you’re an email marketer! According to a Pivotal Veracity study, early morning email delivery has the lowest open rates. This makes sense since the first time most people check their email is when they arrive at work, and the common habit is to delete anything unimportant in order to reduce clutter before the day starts.

If you’re emailing in North America, the vast majority of the population leaves in the Eastern Standard time zone. Subsequently, it’s best to focus your email send time on hitting that particular time zone (unless you have the capability to segment your list by geographic location and send in staggered sends).

While metrics are different for everybody, as a general rule, the best open rates tend to be seen in emails that are sent around lunch time (noon or 1:00pm) EST. This also makes logical sense as people tend to relax a bit with their inboxes at lunch.

The Day Dilemma

There are a few fast and easy rules about the best days to send. But as Comm100 will discuss at the conclusion of this article, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t test to find out if they hold true for you.

Monday Blues: Monday’s are considered the worst day to send mass email if open rate is important to you (and, of course, open rate is important to you). The logic, again, involves the theory that most people spend most of their inbox time at work. When you come into work on a Monday, you instantly start deleting anything that seems like junk or unimportant email so that your inbox isn’t as overwhelming to you. This theory has been backed up by numbers in many email marketing studies. Unless your users have proven to exhibit a different pattern or you have a compelling reason to send on Monday, avoid Monday sends!

Weekend Warriors: It’s also a fact that internet activity in general reduces on weekends. This may be because people spend more time with their families, get outdoors more or are just burnt out from all their enforced online time during the week. Almost every online metric category slips on the weekends, and that includes email opens. Avoid big weekend blasts.

Midweek is the Best Week: Most studies support that sending email on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday will yield the best results. So, if you boil it down, you want to send your email campaign on a midweek day in the afternoon.

Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Make Sure These Hold True for You

Despite all of the rules above, the number one rule of email marketing is “Test. Then test again.” Your particular user base may respond very well to Monday or weekend emails. Maybe you have a lot of mothers who are up early and online, opening emails. The only way to know for sure is to test various send times and establish the best practices for your own list. Even within your list, different list segments may respond in different ways.

If you follow the “Midweek, Midday” rule, you will certainly get decent response rates. Then you can build on that by running some tests to figure out if there may be a more optimized time to send to your email list! Just be sure you remember to keep track of what you sent when!

No matter what day of the week works best for you, the first step in creating a successful email campaign is to select an email partner that meets your needs. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary email sending best practices, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground whether you’re practicing the “Midweek, Midday” rule or trying to tempt weekend email warriors! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Is Email Right for My Product: What Types of Consumers Respond Best to Email Marketing?

Is Email Right for my Product?
What types of consumers respond best to email marketing?

In This Article…

If you’re considering implementing an email marketing program but aren’t sure if it’s really worth the time or effort, Comm100 helps you explore whether your product, website or demographic is ideally suited for email marketing in this article. Comm100 then gives advice on how to find the right email message for your market.

Is Email Right for Everybody?

As you’re evaluating whether or not to launch an email marketing element to your business, you may be wondering if your product, customer base or industry segment is the type that will be responsive to email marketing.

The short answer is that every consumer will respond to the right email message, but, if you’re thinking that certain types of segments perform better, then you’re right.

Without a doubt, the hospitality and travel industry and the entertainment industry receive the highest delivery, open and click-through rates of any industries, according to the Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index. For all industries combined, the average open rate to an opt-in list is above 20% and click-through rates are 5% or more. What this shows is that, across all industries, users will respond to email marketing. However, there are some factors that you should keep in mind.

Is Your Demographic an Online Demographic?

One of the largest factors in determining how responsive your user list will be to email marketing is simply this: “How prevalent is it to purchase your product or service online versus going to a brick and mortar location?” While both types of consumers respond to email marketing, they respond in different ways and to different techniques.

If your product or service is primarily online and consumers typically purchase or research it online, then email marketing is a natural and somewhat easier fit for you. Travel services are an excellent example of this. By far, the majority of travel purchases made each year are made online. This is one of the reasons that the travel and tourism industry’s email marketing campaigns perform as well as they do. People operate in a primarily online environment for that sector. However, in order to make email marketing relevant even if your product or service is primarily an online product or service, you’ll still need to follow a few key steps.

Keep Offers and Content Fresh: Just because a person purchases your product or service online, it doesn’t mean that they want to be told every week about the quality of your brand and your top selling product. If they think that they’re reading the same content every time you send an email, they’ll stop opening!

Link Directly to Product Pages: Promoting a product and then linking to your homepage from the email just leaves users having to search through your site and often giving up on ever finding the product that they wanted to begin with. Link straight through to the product page for the specific item that you’re talking about.

Personalize and Segment: Inboxes are crowded places these days, and people spend less time in them. Use personalization in your emails and segment your list based on user behavior.

What if my product or service is primarily purchased offline?

You’re still safe to use email marketing! You just need to structure it differently. A great example of this is the clothing industry. People often prefer to purchase clothing in stores so that they can try it on. But you can still incentivize them to be interested in your email in several ways.

If you have a brick and mortar store, send them to it! Include printable coupons for your brick and mortar locations within the email. Make sure you mention those coupons in the subject line to increase your click-through rate.

If you’re online and offline, promote the benefits and offers: Even if something is primarily purchased in stores, there are benefits to purchasing it online (convenience, uniqueness) that you can promote. Also, offers are even more important here.

Purchasers of products that are often purchased offline will be receptive to email if there’s something in the email that they truly want. Just be sure and provide that to them!

Is this all true for B2B as well?

It is, though be aware that B2B email is much more difficult and you should expect slightly lower open and click-through rates. Business decision makers have more crowded inboxes than an average consumer. Additionally, they spend time in their inboxes (or at least the inbox of the email address that you’re likely to have) differently than regular consumers. A B2C consumer is in his or her inbox during leisure time, often looking for activities to create interest. A B2B consumer is in his or her inbox during work hours, usually conducting business, and must be even more incentivized to open your email in the rush of other activities.

B2B email marketing obviously works as it’s the staple of many a marketing campaign, but you’ll need to be even more diligent about subject lines, content and standing out as something exciting.

There’s an email solution that will appeal to just about any type of customer in any type of demographic. You just need to be dedicated to taking the time to find out what that is and optimize it. Take the time to think about what your customers would really want to see in their inboxes. And take the time to test several different ideas and see what users will really respond to. Email is a key customer communication touch point regardless of what type of customer it is!

The first step to getting started with email marketing, whether you’re an ideal demographic or one that will need to work a little harder, is to select a quality email sending partner. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground to just about any type of customer or client email list! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

The Big Image Myth: Why Your Email Newsletter Shouldn’t Have Too Many Images?

The Big Image Myth
Why your email newsletter shouldn’t have too many images, even if they look great on your screen!

In This Article…

If you are just starting to send marketing email and need advice on how to design an email template, or if you are currently sending email but aren’t satisfied with the click-through or deliverability results, this article explains why using large, graphic images in an email template will actually make your email less successful and detract from its overall performance.

Why Should I Second Guess Using Images?

Without a doubt, the number one error we see in companies who want to begin an email marketing program is the desire to design an email that looks exactly like a webpage or, worse yet, like a print postal mailer. In specific, Comm100 means designing an email that uses a lot of images within the email.

Comm100understands why email designers like images. An email, just like any other piece of marketing material, looks better when it’s got appealing images in it. If it displays properly to the end-user, it probably converts better as well. The problem, as you’re about to see, is that most end-users won’t see your graphics. As an added bonus, including graphics can get you sent to the spam folder.

How Do Images Get Included in Emails?

What you first need to understand is that there are two ways to send an image in an email. The first way ensures that the user will see the image, even if in some cases it’s only as an attachment to the message. This method is called “embedding” the image. Essentially, you’re attaching the image to the email. The plus side is that, in one way or another, the user is sure to get the image. The downside is two fold. Firstly, spam filters look for large, embedded images and often give you a higher spam score for including them (Lots of spammers use images to avoid having the inappropriate content in their emails read by the spam filters.). Secondly, if you pay to send your email by weight or kilobyte, this increases the size of your message. If you’re not careful, it can even make your message too big for the parameters of the email provider.

The second way to include images (and the far more common way) is the same way that you put an image on a web page. Within the email, you provide a url that is the reference to the image’s location on your server, exactly the same way that you would on a web page. This has several benefits. Firstly, you won’t get caught for spamming or for your message “weighing” too much because of the image. Secondly, you can make changes to the images after the email has been sent if you find errors in them. On the flip side, your recipient will need to actively turn on image viewing in their email client to see your images.

What Does It Mean When You Say “Have Image Viewing Turned On?”

Unfortunately, even as Comm100 speaks, image urls and image files are being used to plant viruses on computers and to collect information about people. For this reason, most email service providers, such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail, set the default status on delivered messages to block images.

What a user sees when this happens is a large, white, empty space (with your image alt or title text if you’ve included it) and often a message to right click to download the images. Most people spend less than a minute scanning an email while they decide whether to read it or delete it. If you’re email is full of images, they don’t see much that allows them to make a decision. Chances are, unless users are already very loyal to your brand and interested in your content, you are about to get deleted.

Email users can overwrite the “images off” default in their email, but most of them don’t. Most studies and surveys reveal that anywhere from 40% to 60% of users read email with the images turned off. Any way you cut it, that’s almost half of your recipient base who won’t see your email with the images as you intended. And that’s not even counting mobile phone users!

How Much Do Mobile Phone Users Impact Image Viewing?

Increasingly, mobile phone users impact your email viewing greatly. Recent studies suggest that up to 20% of your users check their mail on text-only mobile phone applications. If your email is a single image, or is based on a great deal of images, you won’t resolve to those users at all.

So, What Should I Do?

Surprisingly, Comm100 would like to tell you that you should use images. You should just use very few of them and be careful where you put them.

Images definitely have a marketing impact. A portion of your viewers will see them and turn them on. If you just follow these basic steps with images, you’ll be fine. Also, remember that you can do a lot of things just using html tables and colors that will make your email visually appealing AND deliverable.

The Less Than 25% Rule: No more than 25% of the real estate in your email template should be image-based. You want at least ¾ of the email to be readable without images.

Alt and Title Text: This is the text that is contained within your image url that appears when the image doesn’t load (and in some cases appears when your mouse hovers over a graphic). Having this text beneath your graphics is important because you can still convey the message that was in the graphic even if the graphic doesn’t load.

No Trapped Messages! The basic rule is this: “If it’s important that your readers know a piece of information, it cannot be trapped in an image.” All important information, such as price, product title, value proposition and expiration date, must be in html text. This includes “Click to order” buttons. If those are images, you’ll have users looking for where they’re supposed to click, and possibly not finding it. Those should be html buttons.

Images are an important part of any marketing campaign or collateral. However, email presents challenges in that you can’t control how the end product displays to the user in all cases. It’s better to have an email that can be delivered and seen by the user than to have one that looks fantastic … but only when it’s loaded on your computer screen and not when it’s in an inbox!

Whether you love your email template or are just starting to optimize it for best results, the first step to a successful email campaign is choosing and email provider who meets your needs.
Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary of how to use images in emails, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground with or without large image files! Check it out at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

quote from http://www.comm100.net/email-marketing-tutorial/the-big-image-myth-why-your-email-newsletter-shouldnt-have-too-many-images.html

Opt in? Opt out? What is single opt in and double opt in? Which is better for you?

Opt in? Opt out?

What is single opt in and double opt in? Which is better for you?

In This Article…
If you are starting to build an email list, either on your website or by purchasing or renting emails from others, this article explains the three different kinds of email lists and the pros and cons of each. Those email list types range from the most restrictive to the least restrictive. Each is explained in detail below.

What are the Types of Opt-In Lists?

You started building up your email list through a sign up box on your site or a checkbox when a person registers or purchases a product. Then, along came some fussy marketing consultant and said, “Is this an opt-in list? Is it a double opt-in list?” You probably looked at them and wondered what exactly they meant and why it mattered.

There are three ways to build an email list: Negative Opt-Out, Opt-In and Double Opt-In. Comm100 will describe all three options here as well as their benefits and drawbacks. You can then decide which is the right list option for you.

Negative Opt-Out Email Lists

You’ll sometimes hear this type of list called simply “Opt-Out” or “Negative Consent”. When a person registers at your website, makes a purchase or signs up for a free white paper or other freebie from you, somewhere in the small print is the information that by taking that action they are agreeing to receive email from you. The user can choose to opt-out and leave the email list later, but they’ve implicitly given you permission to email them.

The upside of this method is that it can grow your list very quickly. If everybody who takes an action on your site is then on your email list, your list can grow quite rapidly. Many of those people who wouldn’t have actively signed up for your email list if you asked them to will ultimately discover that they appreciate your email newsletters or promotions and will turn into active readers and customers.

The downside is that this type of list building can also increase the number of spam complaints that you receive when you send an email. Users who don’t remember signing up for your email, or who are angry that you tricked them into signing up, will quickly hit the spam flag when they receive your email. This has negative long and short term effects. In the short term, it makes your email metrics look less successful. In the long term, higher than average spam complaints will do permanent damage to your email sender reputation and could result in all of your emails going directly to the junk folder.

Opt-In Email Lists

In this type of email list, a user actively opts-in, or chooses to be on, your email list. This can be done either by having them check a box when they register or purchase or by including a special sign-up box on your website. Users enter their email, check a box that says that they agree to receive email from you and then submit that information via a clickable button. You can also choose to collect other customer or client information at the same time.

The benefit of this type of email list is that your clients are actively saying that they want to receive email from you. Therefore you’re building the most responsive email list that you can.

However, there are some drawbacks as well. Your email list will grow more slowly. People will not as often take the extra action to sign-up as they will simply forget to “not sign up”. Also, because this isn’t a “double opt-in” technique (see below), it’s entirely possible for people to sign-up their friends and family. When that happens, you can expect the much-feared spam complaints.

Double Opt-In Email Lists

This is the most difficult, but ultimately safest, way to build an email list. It also usually has the highest return on investment since it creates a list of entirely qualified leads. In this method, a person opts-in as described above. They then receive an email from you with a link that they must click in order to be added to the email list. Even if they’ve provided a valid email address and checked a box saying that they allow you to email them, they MUST click the link in the email in order to prove that they really signed up for your email list.

The problem with this type of email list, as you can see, is that it is the slowest way to build your email list. Often, even asking people to complete one action to sign-up for an email list is too much, let alone two actions! While many users are accustomed to the double opt-in process, they’ll need to really want your email product to sign up and then confirm.

The benefits of this type of list building are significant. You’re sure that you really are emailing to people who want to receive your email. While this won’t completely eliminate your spam or deliverability problems, it will reduce them. If you’re paying per email address sent to, it also means that you’ll experience a higher ROI on each send because your list will have fewer junk addresses on it. Finally, if you do receive spam complaints, you can more effectively defend yourself against them by proving that the person double opted-in (It’s good to create your confirmation link to log the email address, IP and date that it was clicked from.).

You’ll need to decide at what point on the spectrum you’re most comfortable. If simply growing the number of names on your list is the priority, Negative Opt-In is your best choice. The more qualified and “safe” you want your list to be, the more you should move up to an Opt-In or Double Opt-In list. Certainly, when renting or buying a list, you should ask if the list was originally Negative Opt-In, Opt-In or Double Opt-In.

No matter what type of list you’re using, the first step to successful email marketing is choosing your email sending partner wisely. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary explanation of list types, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground no matter how you obtained your email list! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Plain Text or HTML: Which Email Template Type Should You Use?

Plain Text or HTML?
Which email template type should you use?

In This Article…

If you’re beginning an email campaign and aren’t sure whether to use a graphically-based html email template to improve the visual appearance of your email or a plain text email template to improve the deliverability of your email (and conserve resources), this article lays out the pros and cons of each type. Comm100 will then give you advice on how to optimize your email marketing metrics through template formats and displays.

What is Plain Text Email and HTML Email?

The first thing that you need to understand is “What is plain text email?” and “What is html email?” HTML email is an email that is formatted like a web page, using colors, graphics, table columns and links. Imagine any newsletter that you receive from a service. That’s most likely what an HTML email looks like. A plain text email is an email that only includes text. Imagine your typical inter-office email communication. That’s what a plain text email looks like.

Email marketers generally don’t debate which format is better. HTML email converts better in marketing tests almost every time. However, there are some factors you should consider before deciding which mail format to use. Ultimately, there’s a solution to getting the best part of both worlds.

HTML Email

HTML email does, in fact, come with some problems attached to it. It’s an imperfect science, and you should be aware of ways in which html email can fail.

- Spam: HTML email can put you in the spam folder if your code is sloppy. Email providers’ spam filters look for code that looks like it’s been copied from a Word document, and they increase your spam score based on that.

- Coding Time: HTML emails are also harder to code than html pages. They need to be coded to appeal to spam filters, and to use css in very specific ways. In some cases, you’ll even need to use different html email templates to send to different providers in order to make your email look consistent in all email clients.

- End User Display: Some email providers (Gmail, particularly) will strip out many elements of your html email code regardless of how well it’s built. So no matter how many hours your developer and designer spent making your email look amazing, it may still end up as black text on a white background with blue links.

- Image Blocking: Almost without fail, the majority of your end users will be reading their email with their images turned off. Therefore, every image that you used in your html email will be invisible to them. That means that there will be lots of dead white space in their email instead of colorful, inviting sales or informational text.

- Mobile Phone Users: Up to 20% of your end users are reading their email on their mobile phone. Your html email won’t display at all on many phones.

However, it’s important to keep in mind the benefits of html email.

- Better Visual Engagement: You only have a fraction of a second when a user opens an email for them to decide whether to read it or immediately delete it. The use of color and interesting visuals can keep them interested long enough to read and become interested in your message.

- Better Information Organization: Most messages are not best delivered in a chunky text paragraph but instead in bulleted lists, columns, table layouts and a variety of text justifications. Also, differentiating words and concepts with color makes it easier on the reader to identify the important parts of the email. This can’t be done with plain text.

Pros and Cons

If you wanted to break it down into an easy theory to remember, it would sound like this:

Plain text email is better if

- You are incredibly worried about deliverability into the inbox

- You are expecting replies to be sent to your email

- You are concerned about making sure your email visuals do not break or appear incorrectly in email clients

- You don’t have the development and design resources to create a well tested, tightly coded html email template

HTML email is better if:

- Your main objective is to convert a sale

- The information you are presenting needs to be visually organized

- You have the in-house resources to create a workable and successful email template

- And, most importantly, you can send a plain text version as well (see below)!

Send Both!

The best solution if you want to send an html email is to send a plain text version attached. The plain text version will then display in instances where the html version can’t load. For example, the plain text version would appear in many mobile phone scenarios and often certain Outlook clients. Many third party email providers offer this option as a default option. In fact, some of them even require that you enter a plain text version along with your html version before they will allow you to send. In this way, you will get the benefit of displaying color, graphics and format to those who can see it without prohibiting your other users from reading the message.

If, however, you’ve only got the capability to send one option or the other, Comm100 suggests you review the pros and cons above and then decide which is best for you. It won’t be the same answer for everybody!

Whether you’re sending a bells-and-whistles html email or a stripped-down plain text email, whom you use for your email provider is the first step in creating a successful campaign. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary of the pros and cons of different email types, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground whether you’re sending html art or simple plain text! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Hit the Inbox: 10 Tips to Keep Your Email from Going to the Junk Folder

Hit the Inbox!
10 Tips to Keep Your Email from Going to the Junk Folder

In This Article…

If you’re beginning an email program or you’ve been sending email already but know that you’re going into your recipients’ junk mail folders, this article explains how to improve deliverability. In this article, you’ll learn how to optimize your email program to give it the best chance of making into a user’s inbox. This process is called “deliverability” and is the first step to successful email marketing.

What is “Hitting the Inbox”?

One of the greatest problems facing email marketers is making sure that your email goes to the user’s inbox instead of the spam folder. When everything is driven by whether a user opens an email, that means that the user needs to actually SEE the email first. In truth, how many of us check our spam or junk folders regularly?

Getting your marketing email to actually go into the inbox is one of the most complicated parts of email marketing (and the part that fails the most often). Here are ten tips to keep your email from ending up in the junk folder.

1.Get on the Hotmail and Yahoo! White Lists

Hotmail and Yahoo! both keep lists of approved senders. Once you’re on that list, you’ll almost always go into the inbox. If you send a particularly spammy email, however, you can be removed from the list. The process can be frustrating and take a long time, but it’s well worth it.

2.If You’re Using Your Own Server, Make Sure it “Drips” the Messages

Spam filters at most email providers look to see how many messages you’re sending at a time. If you’re sending to a large list, even if you have a fast and efficient email sending server, have the server “drip” the messages out slowly. You really don’t want more than a couple thousand to hit any one email provider per hour if you’re playing it safely.

3.Break Large Lists Into Smaller Ones

There are many reasons to break large email lists into smaller ones, but the best reason is that doing so will mean that the spam complaints that you receive when you send your email won’t be in one huge mass. It is inevitable that even loyal subscribers sometimes mark you as spam. If you send your large list in smaller segments, the email provider (Hotmail, MSN, etc.) will see less spam complaints bundled together at one time.

4.“Clean” Your Email List Frequently

Most, if not all, email providers’ spam filters penalize your domain or IP with a higher spam score (meaning you are more likely to end up in the junk folder) if they see that you are sending emails to bad email accounts. A bad email account is an address that doesn’t exist, has been disabled or has a full inbox. These addresses should be cleaned (or “pruned”) from your email list regularly to avoid this. If you allow them to add up on your list, you will eventually be flagged as a spam provider.

5.Provide a Clear Unsubscribe Link

Nobody likes it when somebody unsubscribes from their email list. However, providing a clear way to unsubscribe (and then honoring that unsub quickly) means that users are less likely to get frustrated and just mark you as spam. The number one criterion for ending up in the junk box is the number of spam complaints that you receive, so avoiding them at all costs is critical.

6.Encourage Your Customers to Add You as a Friend or Contact

Once a user has added you to his or her contact list, friend list or address book, you will always end up in their inbox. Use every opportunity to encourage those on your email list to add you as a contact. Comm100 suggests doing it in the email sign up conformation email, on the confirmation page and during most customer service transactions. A typical way to ask customers to do this is to say, “Ensure that you continue to receive the quality information from us that you enjoy by adding us to your contact list.”

7.Test Your Email to Seed Addresses BEFORE You Send to the Main List

Before you send your entire email list the message you’ve worked so hard on, send a test message to each of the big email providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, AOL and one generic office address that is viewed in an Outlook client). Send the test email using the exact same server and information that you’ll use with your main list. If you end up in the junk box on the test send, then you’ll end up in the junk box on your main send. The pre-send test means that you can try different subject lines and email content to try to figure out what sent you to spam.

8.Don’t Have Sloppy HTML Code

Spam filters check for bad html code, particularly if it looks like the code was done in Microsoft Word and then thrown into an email. Use a professional coder (preferably one who has done email templates before and knows the best way to make them resolve properly in an inbox) or a template provided by your email sending partner.

9.Don’t Use “The Big Image”

Sending an email that’s all one big image file is a bad idea for many reasons. Foremost among those reasons is that spam filters look for those types of image-based emails. Big image files often carry hidden messages that would normally get caught in spam filters (words like “free” and “Viagra”), so, when a spam filter can’t read any real text in an email and only sees an image, it assumes the worst.

10.Don’t Write Text that Sounds Like a Spammer!

This one should be obvious! The more “spam-like” text and phrases your email uses, the less likely it is to end up in the inbox. There are a number of free software solutions to check the “spam score” of an email before you send it, but there are also basic rules.

•Don’t use the word “free” too many times.
•Don’t use ALL CAPS.
•Don’t use lots of colored fonts.
•Only use one exclamation point at a time!
•Stay away from words you’d see in spam: Viagra, drugs, porn, guaranteed winner.
If you’ve seen it used in a spam message that you received, don’t use it in your own email message!

Even if you do all of these things and do them perfectly, you may still end up in the junk box. Email spam filter criteria change almost daily and can be impacted by things that you have no control over. However, if you, as a habit, send good email that your clients want, you’ll get into the inbox more often than not. Be sure to follow the above guidelines because, once an email provider thinks that your email is spam, it is very hard to get back into the inbox!

One of the first steps to getting into the inbox is to choose a quality email partner. Comm100, who provided you with this spam tip list, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground and into the inbox! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

2010 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition

2010 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition (also known as Auto China 2010), the one of the most important automotive shows worldwide, will be held in New China International Exhibition Center (Tianzhu) and in China International Exhibition Center (Jing’anzhuang) from April 25 to May 2nd, Beijing. Complete range of domestic and imported passenger cars and commercial vehicles will be exhibited in the New Center, while multiple world and China auto accessories and parts, as well as relative products will be displayed in the Old Center from April 23 to April 27. In total, nearly 2100 companies from 16 countries and regions will exhibit, utilizing exhibition area of about 200,000m2. We sincerely welcome automotive industry home and abroad, media, all auto enthusiasts and people from all walks of life to visit Auto China 2010.

Organizers：China Machinery Industry Federation(CMIF),China National Machinery Industry Corporation(SINOMACH),China Council for the Promotion of International Trade(CCPIT),China Association of Automobile Manufacturers(CAAM);

Producers：China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, Automotive Sub-Council (CCPIT Auto), China National Automotive Industry International Corp.(CNAICO),China International Exhibition Center Group Corporation(CIEC), Society of Automotive Engineers of China(SAE-China).

The Secretariat of Auto China 2010, formed by producers, is in charge of all organizating work.